Sign up for our mailing list

News

Monday, April 1st, 2013

AV Club Streaming KEATON HENSON Album This Week

The AV Club is previewing in its entirety the new album Birthdays from acclaimed young musical laureate of heartache Keaton Henson. The record comes out in North America this April 9th via Anti-. Henson has become a bonafide sensation in his native England with the release last year's self-recorded debut Dear..., described by Q Magazine as “Beautiful and uncompromising... packed with songs of delicious but unsettling despair” and by The Fader as “a tear stained love letter.”

Henson will mark the anticipated release of Birthdays with two rare live performances, the first on April 8th at the Housing Works Bookstore in New York City, an event recently profiled in the New Yorker. And on April 11th Henson will play a sold out show in Los Angeles at the Masonic Temple in the historic Hollywood Forever cemetery.

Though created almost entirely on guitar, Henson's newest work Birthdays generates an intensely affective sound that is unexpectedly complex and powerfully evocative. The lyrics are so deeply personal it can feel voyeuristic, recalling the confessions of a close friend or lover. If one were to reach for a point of reference, it would be figures such as Nick Drake and Tim Buckley or even Dylan Thomas and Oscar Wilde. In an early review of Birthdays, the BBC proclaimed, “Henson’s stripped-back sound is almost shocking in its purity.”